to the heaven of heavens, where he "presumed, an earthly guest, and drew empyreal air;"--with these he has constructed a poem of a thousand pages, exhibiting the greatest diversity of characters, scenes, circumstances, and events, that were ever embraced in an equal compass; while all are made perfectly to harmonise and conduce to one process, carried on at every step of his pilgrimage, namely, the gradual purification of the poet himself, by the examples which he sees and the lessons which he hears; as well as by the toils he undergoes, the pains he endures, and the bliss he partakes, in his long and dreary path down into the nether regions, where there is no hope; up the steep hill, where, though there is suffering, there is no fear of ultimate release; and on his flight through the "nine-enfolded spheres," where all are as happy as they can be in their present station, yet, as they pass from stage to stage, rise in capacity and means of enjoyment to fulness of felicity in the beatific vision. Dante was the very poet, and the "Divina Commedia" the very poem, to be expected from the influence of all existing circumstances in church and state at the time when he flourished. The poet and his age were homogeneous, and his song was as truly in season as that of the nightingale in spring; the winter of barbarism had broken up, the summer heat of refinement had not yet come on: a century earlier there would have been too much ignorance, a century later too much intelligence, to form such a theme and such a minstrel; for though Dante, in any age, must have been one of its greatest bards, yet the bard that he was he could not have been in any other than that in which he lived.